Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The first five minutes are free - renting articles on DeepDyve

In 2011 I wrote a short post about DeepDyve, a service where you could rent access to an article. DeepDyve has launched a "5-Minute Freemium" service where you can view an article online for 5 minutes, for free. You have to log in, either with DeepDyve or using Facebook, but no actual money changes hands. If you want to read for longer, or download an article then you have to get out your credit card.

I've added support for DeepDyve to BioNames. If an article is available in DeepDyve, BioNames displays a link (see http://bionames.org/references/6952b806f87de2106669b2412043a4ab for an example). DeepDyve makes it possible to quickly check a fact (for example, the spelling of a taxonomic name). It obviously doesn't tackle bigger issues such as access to text for data mining, but if you just need to check something, or follow a lead, then it's an interesting and useful wrinkle on publishing models.